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NOT FINISHING A piece of writing can feel like the death of a dream. That bright and beautiful impulse to express something truthful represents the very best in you, the part that wants to connect to other people and share with them how you make sense of the world. Many writers start strong, with big ambitions, but eventually reach a crisis of completion.
Untold numbers of novels, screenplays, and memoirs, begun with hope and a little hubris, lie in envelopes that haven’t been opened in years, on dusty shelves in the back corners of seldom-used rooms, in rarely accessed files on computer desktops, and in the far reaches of their creators’ minds.
You may unconsciously expect that by ignoring your project you can make it disappear, and that the obligation to complete it will fade. That is not the case. Partially completed novels, short stories, and personal essays seem to become proof of your personal limitations. You did not keep your promise to your story.
As you gradually abandon the effort, as the weeks, months, or years pile up, the project becomes your adversary. When you think of it, you cringe. You start to wonder why you began it in the first place, yet you can’t let it go.
IT DOESN’T HAVE to be that way. The answer is Finishing School.
FINISHING SCHOOL RESTORES order to your work. It helps you set aside a realistic number of hours each week and define a task that can be completed in whatever time you have. Every week you finish something and, week by week, you get the project done. Your steady progress restores your interest in the work and your confidence in your talent.
The two authors of this book, Cary Tennis and Danelle Morton, came to Finishing School as writers with very different styles and experiences. Cary started as a music critic and fiction writer and later wrote a popular advice column for Salon.com. Danelle is a journalist who has written fifteen books, most as an uncredited ghostwriter. Both eventually found themselves unable to complete a much-loved project.
For Cary, it was his novel, and for Danelle, it was a book proposal. Cary had worked on his novel fitfully over eighteen years. Danelle had had the idea for the book for two years but had never been able to get the proposal completed. By working the Finishing School method, both, in the space of three months, renewed their energy, restored their interest, and eventually completed what they set out to do.
The mechanism is simple. Finishing School meets once a week for two hours, during which writers identify specific tasks related to their overall goal and map out specific times during the week to accomplish those tasks. Cary invented the Finishing School method and has been teaching it since 2013. Danelle took his class in 2014 with four others: two screenwriters, a novelist, and a woman writing a short memoir.
At the beginning of Danelle’s first class with Cary, the students examined their calendars and identified times in the next week when they could commit to writing: say, two hours on Wednesday and a longer stretch on one weekend day. Then they set goals for what they wanted to complete in that amount of time. They were paired up with partners whom they agreed to text the moment they began to write, so they would be accountable to someone for their commitment.
When they met a week later, they did not share the writing they had completed during those seven days, only the experience of trying to write during the scheduled time. Finishing School is not about judging and improving the work; rather it is about doing the work no matter how good or bad the writing seems on a particular day. This is an important distinction. Elsewhere in this book you will read about the dangers and pitfalls of critique groups—how even the best-intentioned remarks can lay waste to months of work. Finishing School is different because it focuses solely on your commitment to write.
As Finishing School got the writers moving again, it also revealed what they hadn’t understood about the emotions behind their writer’s blocks. When they were not writing, they spent that time abusing themselves for not writing or being terrified about what others might eventually think of their work. The not writing, the related self-abuse, and the confusion about what to do next merged into seemingly insurmountable writer’s block.
Finishing School revealed that emotional blocks appeared first as mechanical ones. Writers sabotaged themselves repeatedly to avoid work. They set unrealistic goals, underestimated the time tasks take, and failed to account for how their jobs, their houses, their relationships, and the many machines and pets for which they were responsible competed with the commitment to write. They allowed these things to take their writing time away from them, and then they lost their way.
The plain, nonjudgmental format of Finishing School helps writers get control over their emotional relationship with time and appreciate how their yearning to be judged perfect—and the fear that they will not be—creates doubt, shame, and arrogance. You will soon read about the Six Emotional Pitfalls, but for now, if you’ve picked up this book, heartsick that you’ll never, ever, finish what you started, we want to tell you: don’t lose hope.
The Finishing School method doesn’t require you to change, to become a better person who is more organized, more disciplined, and has life under control. It asks only that you take a few simple steps. This book first covers obstacles to finishing, both emotional and practical ones. By exploring these issues, you will come to understand some of the reasons why you are not finishing your work.
Those reasons are deeper than a lack of discipline, but this does not mean you have to spend years in psychotherapy. You can learn to acknowledge them when they come up, and keep going. That is the beauty of it. You may be briefly derailed by an emotional pitfall, but with the support of Finishing School you can keep moving at a comfortable pace.
It may take some writers longer than others to finish. So what? Only you know when a piece is ready to be shown to an audience. As long as you are showing up for work and grappling with it in all its dimensions, you can remain proud and confident.
Through Finishing School , writers once again experience how truly good it feels to write.